Yes, as many reviewers have pointed out, J’dal is a drow. Or at least she was.
J’dal originally started as a mod for Neverwinter Nights 2. After putting about 30 hours into it and not getting past the opening scene, I abandoned it. I started work on it a year or two later as a text adventure and ditched the whole D&D thing, and made up my own tidally-locked world.
I uploaded this on Oct 9th, then quickly took it down when I realized authors are not allowed to discuss their games during voting. Now that the comp is finished, it’s back up.
Judging from reviews, J’dal has failed at a lot of things, let’s see if it at least succeeds in my own goals for the project.
1) I didn’t want the game to be lonely.
I didn’t want the player wandering dark tunnels by themselves, and having no one to turn to when problems came up. I wanted there to be characters to chat with, journey with and ask for help.
I think I kind of succeeded. The characters are there, but no one has really expressed a fondness for them they way I had hoped. They often came up with blank responses to player questions, which was something that I had hoped to avoid. But I think they react appropriately to player actions in most situations.
2) I wanted to avoid exposition.
This left a lot of players scratching their heads, but I hate it whenever I feel fiction is addressing me, the audience, instead of the characters talking to each other realistically. This means leaving the player in the dark, but I’d rather mystery than exposition dumps. I tried to use context as much as possible to get the characters thinking / talking about the backstory without beating the player over the head with it. Some players have expressed that they liked this, other players were confused, but I’m mostly happy with the way that it turned out. Something that players didn’t like was the short, non-descriptive room descriptions. But this was kind of deliberate. J’dal is a “whatever” teenager, and I tried to make the room descriptions in-character.
3) I wanted to give the player freedom over the main character.
I wanted the player to determine what J’dal does, and thus who she is or who she becomes. I wanted the player’s way of handling things to influence Jdal’s personality. I only achieved this marginally. I hope you had J’dal check the food, the waitress spat in it. How the player deals with this affects J’dal’s personality and her thoughts on things later in the game. Okay, one thing.
Unfortunately because the game was cut so short, I didn’t have the length to develop this to a noticeable state for the player. Also, because the puzzles were too difficult / underhinted, players chose the first solution they came across rather than choosing one that felt right for their character.
I also didn’t want J’dal to refuse to follow player commands, saying something like “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” As such, I needed another way to limit the player’s available actions to prevent the scope of the project from becoming unmanageable. I tried to limit the player with things outside the player’s control – the world and the actions of other characters. This is the reason that the main character is young and dependent on her father. I think I succeeded somewhat at this, but still sometimes used refusal to act as a crutch.
Last week I completed my first interactive fiction, called J’dal, and entered it into the Interactive Fiction Competition 2012. You can play it now! If you’ve played it, leave a comment below.
Ryan Kinsman's IF blog 